Israel has no national sex offender registry, so Rabbi Horowitz thought he was helping by tweeting to families about a convicted sex offender in their midst.
One would think that a convicted sex offender might want to stay out of the courts in his new country of residence.
Not so with Yona Weinberg.
The Brooklyn sex offender who moved to Israel in 2014 the day after police knocked on his door over new charges, is suing a New York rabbi for defamation after the rabbi, Yakov Horowitz, tweeted Weinberg’s whereabouts in Jerusalem. Israel does not have a public sex offender registry so the rabbi, a child advocate, warned residents via Twitter that Weinberg was a dangerous presence in their midst.
Weinberg’s Brooklyn-based lawyer Samuel Karliner, who helped him manage sex-offender registry requirements while he was in the United States, said his client did not flee to Israel, as Horowitz’s tweets contended, and that he had been planning to move there with his family for some time.
Few days ago, I tweeted warning from magainuHar Nof residents:
Beware of Convicted sex offender yona Weinberg.
deeply troubled some Har Nof ppl suppressing efforts to warn residents of Convicted sex offender yona Weinberg.
After more than a year of legal wrestling, the two are set to appear in a Jerusalem court on November 23 for a preliminary hearing.
Rabbi Yakov Horowitz is flying to Israel to defend himself.
“The ticket is purchased. Let the games begin,” said Horowitz, founding dean of Orthodox yeshiva Darchei Noam in Rockland County, about 25 miles north of New York City
The rabbi feels he must fight the charges to avoid setting a dangerous legal precedent in a country that has become a destination of choice for some Orthodox child molesters due to its open door policies toward all Jews.
A loss would mean, “Every sex offender would be given the script: molest kids, move to Israel, sue anyone who posts anything about you,” said Horowitz, who is also the founder and director of the Center for Jewish Family Life/Project Y.E.S., a mentorship program for at-risk teens in New York.
Israeli courts leveled a $55,000 default judgment against Horowitz in June 2015 after he didn't show up in court. He said was unaware that he was being sued because he never opened the documents that a stranger threw at him while he was in the middle of teaching hundreds of people in a Jerusalem lecture hall at late at night.
“I assumed it was threatening stuff for my advocacy, which has happened before,” he said of the papers.
He ended up paying several hundred dollars to have the judgement removed, money he could have spent settling the case, he said. But that would have required him to admit wrongdoing and remain quiet.
He refused. “I will fight this until the end,” he said. Otherwise, “People will be terrified to post information about sex offenders.”
To win a defamation case in Israel, a plaintiff must only prove that degrading things had been said or written about him. Unlike in the United States, he does not have to prove his reputation, livelihood or social standing have been harmed, according to legal experts.[...]
Indeed, Weinberg silenced Jerusalem’s Rabbi Daniel Eidensohn by threatening him with a defamation lawsuit in May. The psychologist and child advocate, who had posted newspaper accounts of his 2009 conviction and warnings that included Weinberg’s address in Har Nof, immediately deleted all mention of the convicted sex offender from his blog. [...]
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